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The Immorality of Morals and the Future of Amorality

Moralistic Conservatives and liberals alike seem to be consumed by a need to
establish a baseline of morals, ethics and or virtue in the hopes that society
will become better or at least more civil. There are numerous articles and
political debates questioning why we have lost our way, why we have become
self-absorbed, greedy, uncaring, and basically lacking in morals. Morals are
perceived of as a set of values that a society must have to survive, and it
seems the pundits have some means of measuring it over time, and as they would
have it, we live in a most unethical period in history. This is stated
without first defining what means of measurement is used. We no longer practice
slavery, infanticide, drawing-and-quartering heretics, etc.! Are we less moral
now because we have given up these practices?

On the contrary, I will put forth in this essay that morality (henceforth to
include ethics and virtue) is nothing more than an evolutionary strategy that
has been with primates and continues on in humans for the singular purpose of
promoting the selfish genes that direct our behavior. In essence, I will show
that morality is a means to indoctrinate the group to behave in a beneficial way
as perceived by the group before the agricultural revolution, and later the
group's political and religious elite when modern civilization started to evolve
10,000 years ago. But before I get started I will have to define what it is that
I mean by morality.

There are two parts to morality. The first has always been with us to
organize our social lives and is called natural morality. The other is
concerned with what we should be doing and is called laws (freedom), ethics,
or moral philosophy. In Darwin, Dominance, and Democracy, Somit
and Peterson state, "But the capacity to believe and then to act on the
basis of those beliefs is not limited to any specific set of ideas. There is
almost no limit to the range and variety, or eccentricity, of the values humans
are capable of accepting and acting upon." They are describing indoctrination,
the necessary mechanism that allows a moral system to be accepted by a group,
and every human has a need to adopt or subjugate themselves to some moral code,
whether from the family, the church, or some new-found cult.

So morality has always been there, not good or bad, just a means to organize
small societies or tribes before civilization, to keep the group sound and
organized against outside forces. The only criterion was survival in the face of
predators or competing bands of humans. Those behavioral genes that did not
allow humans to become indoctrinated with the core beliefs of the social group
(tribe, troop, clan, etc.) did not survive. So today, our genes make it easy for
us to welcome becoming indoctrinated at an early age, and later in life we can
shift that acceptance of indoctrination to another set of rules if circumstances
warrant (joining a cult). But most of us will adhere to some basic rules of
morality.

The concepts of moral philosophy, that is laying down a set of rules that we
could all follow from basic notions of the good, has not been as successful in
controlling peoples' lives. From the Greeks to St. Thomas Acquinas, Kant and now
Rawls, one moral philosopher after another has been trying to formulate a
universal set of moral rules that we can all live by. Unfortunately, the only
way we will accept these rules is through indoctrination (again from the outside
or from within ourselves), and not by pure reason. Kant wrote, "A
metaphysic of morals is therefore indispensably necessary, not merely for
speculative reasons, in order to investigate the sources of the practical
principles which are to be found a priori in our reason, but also because morals
themselves are liable to all sorts of corruption, as long as we are without that
clue and supreme canon by which to estimate them correctly." And later,
"Now it is only in a pure philosophy that we can look for the moral law in
its purity and genuineness (and, in a practical matter, this is of the utmost
consequences): we must, therefore, begin with pure philosophy (metaphysic), and
without it there cannot be any moral philosophy at all."

Since modern humans have been getting along fine without moral philosophy for
at least 100,000 years, and we are no closer now than we were two thousand years
ago to finding a universal solution, I submit that the path that will unscramble
this dilemma is to understand how moral indoctrination came about, from our
primate past. Then we can decide what we are to do with morality, and like other
artifacts such as inter-tribal murder and genocide, maybe we should think again
about how to use our innate proclivity to demand that others think and act like
ourselves, and formulate a modern structure of behavior that will make sense in
a modern society with many different perceptions of morality.

Churchland presents a moral paradigm as one of a naturally occurring set of
rules, learned and adhered to as part of culture, and now is interwoven in the
judicial system, using a set of useful rules and precedents, not unlike applying
scientific principles to natural phenomenon because the rules work.[1] He
equates religious law, the attempts of the egalitarian left to establish rights,
and multiculturalism's attempt to establish a new set of laws condemning Western
culture with the transcendental moralists trying to establish moral
philosophy. Likewise, Wilson equates moral reasoning with natural sciences,
based on its origin in our evolutionary past. He argues that either moral values
are independent, whether from god or philosophical constructs, or moral values
come from humans alone, from our very nature.[2]

In the rest of this article, I will be discussing only natural morality
and indoctrinability, that which has always been with us. I will leave
the philosophers to their struggle of trying to determine how many angels can
dance on the head of a pin.

MORALITY AN EVOLUTIONARY CONCEPT was first elucidated by Edward O. Wilson. He
asserted that morality was an innate feature of our evolutionary past. This one
concept has been attacked almost as much as the research on the differences in
intelligence between groups and races. The attack, as always, came mostly from
Stephen Gould and Richard Lewontin, always trying to push back science to
promote a universalistic Marxist model of how to improve mankind. But as usual,
it is impossible to stop science, and that morality is an integral part
of our evolutionary past is now well established in the studies of behavior
genetics.

Most authors seem to promote one or the other of two functions for morality,
internal cohesion and external threat. However morality served both equally
well. In Darwinism, Dominance and Democracy by Somit and Peterson, the
authors state, "Humans are social primates, closely (almost embarrassingly)
akin genetically to the chimpanzees and only slightly less so to the gorillas.
Working over at least 10 million years, natural selection has endowed the social
primates with a predisposition (to understate the matter) for
hierarchical social structures. That is, they invariably form groups, troops,
tribes, and societies characterized by marked differences in individual status
in terms of dominance and submission, command and obedience, and by unequal
access to many of the good things of life. This form of morality then serves
inclusive fitness; it is there for one reason, to improve the survivability of
the tribe. SOMIT AND PETERSON later state, "Indoctrinability, then,
together with dominance, hierarchy, and obedience, is one of the innate
behavioral capacities and characteristics of our species. As might be expected,
in most instances indoctrinability serves to support and reinforce these
generally authoritarian tendencies. Under other and fairly special conditions,
though, indoctrinability provides a window of opportunity for the acceptance of
democratic ideas and of political actions that, if successful, lead to the
establishment of a democratic polity." And later, "From a
neo-Darwinian perspective, individual selection for indoctrinability in a
language-capable species makes sound evolutionary sense. When individuals accept
the same values, conflict and violence will be diminished, resulting in a more
stable society. From the vantage point of the conforming individual, relative
order and tranquility, in turn, are likely to result in greater reproductive
success and, hence, inclusive fitness."

Morality then is a product of evolution, and served the purpose of uniting
the group, enforcing internal cohesion by establishing rules (somewhat arbitrary
based on the groups history, needs, environment and proclivities) for the
purpose of survival. Rules were not discussed to be good or bad or just or
right. They evolved along with early humans without formal debate or the use of
pure logic. Morality just was. Passed on and varied from generation to
generation. An essential part of morality is that it assumes a natural hierarchy
or social status in the group, a trait found in canines, monkeys and humans
alike (but absent in the common house cat).[3] Along with this morality, or
group indoctrination to make members conform to the rules, was gossip, to
enforce the rules by management of reputations. This is one of the key factors
leading to human's higher intelligence. As we left the time-consuming chores of
physical grooming used by our primate ancestors, we learned to groom each other
by verbal stroking and controlling the action of members through gossip and
reputation.[4]

So those who study the origin of morality see it as a continuum from lower
animals to humans. There is no single species that personifies what it means to
be moral, it was established over millions of years in those species that needed
to stick together as a group for protection from predators. If humans were less
vulnerable from predators, we also could have evolved as solitary hunters and
gatherers without a need for a moral social structure (like the common house
cat), or moral indoctrination. But on the African Savannah, we were ripe for
plucking by numerous predators, much faster and more ferocious than us.

And once humans needed to band together from predators, other humans
also became a threat because of territorial disputes. Chimpanzees have been
observed to commit genocide against other troops, for the obvious selection
advantages of securing a larger hunting and gathering territory, but also
eliminating the threat of attack from other chimpanzees. Our history is steeped
in blood in many ways. So moral indoctrination held the group together in the
face of outside threats, and the more cohesive and accepting of orders from
those of higher rank, to do as they are told, the more likely it would be that
the tribe would survive another war to fight.

Again, it is much easier to enforce moral indoctrination when everyone is
involved in gossiping about each other, comparing who can be trusted and who
will cheat, and generally using the social coercion of the group to enforce the
rules--all long before religion could be established to instill the fear of god
and punishment, another level of moral indoctrination added to tightly control
the behavior of the group. But the more easily-indoctrinated humans had become
with a higher intelligence, the easier it became for humans to succumb to a
leader's demand for submission. Because even as we were becoming more
intelligent, we were not changing in our obedience to follow.[5] Was the
transformation then from a hunter-gatherer's social structure to an agrarian one
where we finally bowed down to a master, one who would count the crops yield and
each individual's share, after taxation? With its concomitant tyranny and
oppression of the subjects, due to our need, our desire, to want to follow
orders, our complicity in our own moral indoctrination has led us to the
ultimate submission to central authority. It seems that when we realize how we
have been duped by kings, tyrants, priests, and presidents, we may not have
gained as much value from the our moral acceptance of rules as was once
thought.[6,7,8]

Doesn't this description of morality seem much more important than how it is
used today? It provided for a survival technique of a primitive culture, now
vanished forever. What once was, is no more, and morality is an evolutionary
artifact, one that is still used to indoctrinate people in numerous belief
structures that make little sense other than people need it like they need
sexual pleasure, the pleasure of obeying their masters and feeling all is right.
In essence, all of the above authors have a slightly different story to tell
about our moral indoctrinability, but the message is the same as far as the
certainty that morality is a built-in aspect of human nature, established by our
evolutionary past, and it is here with us even now whether we need it still or
not. Today, one man's morality is another man's sin. But the need for some
personal morality is as strong as ever.

In thinking about this article, I reflected on my own morality and how
tenaciously it was ingrained in me. Because of my rural upbringing, one of the
real sins is littering. Now that I live in a modern city, where even the
police routinely throw their garbage out of the squad car windows, without any
angst about their behavior, I become as nonplused as I would if I had witnessed
a robbery. To me, littering is a proxy for anyone that is civilized. It is my
moral certitude, and I am unable to do it myself even when I know no one will be
looking. That is what moral indoctrination is all about.

MORALITY HAS BEEN THE MEANS FOR TYRANNY AND GENOCIDE as stated by Somit and
Peterson, "If we were to view some 6,000 years of recorded political
society as a landscape in time, there would stretch out before us a vast,
desolate desert of absolutism, tyranny, and authoritarianism, only rarely
relieved, by an oasis of relative freedom and democracy. To be sure, no two
governments are quite the same; still, aside from a small handful, states have
differed from each other primarily in the degree of obedience and service
demanded from their subjects. Laura Betzig (1986) has described in gruesome
detail the often almost unbelievable acts of subservience, submission, and
sacrifice compelled by rulers of what we might call primitive political
societies. In that respect, the record of more advanced polities, from
Babylonia and ancient Egypt to the present, is sometimes only marginally
better."

Once humans left the primitive small group that defined our genetic nature,
and started forming larger societies, human's need to be submissive or dominant,
depending on one's status, made it easy for social structures to form that
became severely oppressive. Deprivation, torture, human sacrifice, slavery; it
was all done in the name of the few telling the many what to believe in and how
to act. And the followers willingly obeyed without questioning what they were
told or why they so readily believed what they were told. It was in their
nature, they were moral primates, wanting to submit to authority and to
believe.[9]

In MacDonald's analysis we may see a glimmer of hope that we may not have to
be ethnocentric. In his book, he links different kinds of populations and notes
they are not all the same in the way they treat outsiders.[10] Notably, people
from the more populated Mediterranean region are more xenophobic and hostile to
others than people in areas such as Scandinavia where the population was far
less dense. It seems ironic that what the Jews practiced, a form of
ingroup/outgroup morality that made genocide of gentiles acceptable was also
exactly the same as what the National Socialists preached in their attempt to
exterminate the Jews, internal communitarianism (excluding the Jews) and
intolerance of outsiders or nationalism. In MacDonald's second book, Separation
and its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism, he goes
on to explain how the two most prominent features of Judaism, high intelligence
and a belief in the need to keep the blood of Jews pure from contamination
because they are of higher morality and must be a beacon onto the
world was in reality a method of self-deception in order to dominate others.
Again, the use of morality as an ingroup/outgroup rivalry for reproductive
success and a vigilance to destroy the enemy, the gentiles. He traces three
major events whereby the Jews refusal to assimilate and have their blood
tainted caused a likewise reaction from the outgroup: the formation of
Christendom in the Roman Empire, the Inquisition, and the rise of National
Socialism which was a mirror image of Jewish moral principles. None of these
historic events would have occurred if xenophobic driven morals or
indoctrination of a people had not kept them separate from others.

Today, the same ingroup/outgroup morality is in place and still dividing
people. The multiculturalists have singled out white gentiles as the enemy, and
the cause of everything that is wrong with the West. And "By labeling any
persons who disagree with them as racist or sexist, defenders of the current
liberal paradigm are able to protect" their vision of a separation between
all people of color and whites, for no other purpose it seems than to show that
white gentiles suffer from a lack of moral values and therefore have little
credibility in the political process.[11,12] This of course again translates
into resource accumulation and reproductive success for the ingroup (people of
color) against the outgroup (white gentiles). It is the same moral structure
being used for the same purpose as it has been for at least 100,000 years. And
it remains ethnocentric and relative only to the group holding the moral
high-ground with regards to its effect of indoctrination. The less
ethnocentric, more assimilative and universalistic whites will not respond
unless they feel threatened, as is now starting to happen. The media and the
academic moral paradigm has been one of convincing the public that there was
something fundamentally racist with American culture, by using racist tactics to
divide groups against each other.

So even today, as we all praise ourselves over how we live in a democracy
with open debate, the more astute scholars recognize that instead of logic we
continually fall back on moral values to enforce what public policy should be.
The masses, taking their marching orders from the elite, are expected to mouth
the politically correct messages or they are labeled accordingly, just as the
hunter-gatherers did over 10,000 years ago. We always fall back on moral
indoctrination as being the truly correct answer among a populace that is too
willing to follow rather than thinking for themselves.

But again is this necessarily equally innate in all of us? Can't we see some
cultures that are far more intolerant and ethnocentric than others? And if that
is the case, must we always carry around with us the natural tendency towards
tyranny and genocide? I have always been fascinated with how quickly war-like
cultures can seem to change almost overnight, from the Vikings, to the Swiss,
the Japanese and the Germans. When war becomes intolerable we have an innate
ability to change the way we express our moral indoctrination and we quickly
adopt new rules, under the guidance of the post-war political elite telling the
masses, "never mind, we were wrong, millions died for nothing." Humans
are so easily duped. So society under indoctrination can change. But what about
the level of innate xenophobia? That does seem to be at least genetic, and does
run in certain groups, as MacDonald pointed out. However, the Roman Empire was
very open and assimilated others. And this is where eugenics can be good or bad.
As the Jews used eugenics to increase their intelligence, they also increased
their ethnocentrism. Using moral scriptures to ensure racial superiority, those
members of the Jewish groups who were more xenophobic were more likely stay in
the group at any cost. And after 4,000 years of inbreeding, the tendency towards
outgroup intolerance increased. This combination of high intelligence, moral
certitude, and ethnocentrism then can be used as it has in the past for setting
one group against the other with disastrous results like WW II.

But if intelligence is correlated with morality, does this mean that the more
intelligent humans are more easily duped than the less intelligent?[13]
Something does not seem to be logical here. And noting that the Ashkenazi Jews
have the highest average intelligence of any population group (at 117), does it
seem logical that they are more easily indoctrinated than less intelligent
people? Yes -- intelligence makes people able to obey learned rules more
efficiently, able to generalize those rules within the group, but also provides
the more intelligent with the ability to self-indoctrinate. What this tells us
is that indoctrinability is what allows us to have a moral guidance system, and
that system is only as good and as beneficent as the culture evoking the moral
rules. So far as I can determine, Western culture has done the best job of
indoctrinating its people into believing in democracy and in tolerance. But
given straining circumstances, the indoctrination machine, as controlled
by the elite institutions that give the marching orders, could easily slip us
into another global war of unimaginable proportions. Only a firm understanding
of behavior genetics, with a higher average intelligence to understand our own
nature, can deter others from turning a group from peace-loving to war-loving
through moral suasion.

WOULD WE BE BETTER OFF WITHOUT MORALITY? If morality is an artifact of our
evolutionary past, what value does it have for society? It may in fact still
have a great deal of value for controlling the behavior of small voluntary
groups like clubs and associations, and it has a great deal to due with how
family members react with each other.[14] But these are all personal, just
exactly what morality evolved to bring about, the control through guilt and
gossip of the close members of a tribe or clan. It was never meant to control
large political organizations and is not equipped to do so except as an
extension by the rule of law of those moral convictions held by a large percent
of the public, or as advocated and propagandized by the media and the elite to
bring about social change through a change in public opinion. There is no
absolute right or wrong, just moral conditioning (indoctrination) on the
individual level. So what relevance does it have for the Nation? I would argue
none, at least none that cannot be accounted for by the rule of law. If this
Nation is made up of free individuals, that are allowed to pursue their own
personal happiness within the bounds of the law, what is the purpose of
morality?

Morality, as it effects the Nation, can be easily supplanted by law. The
government should apply the rule of law to those behaviors and actions
that it wants to control. Murder, robbery, extortion, theft, treason, littering,
and reckless driving are all actions that can do harm to others by injury or
theft. Where the Nation gets in trouble is trying to apply the rule of law where
the public thinks morality applies, precisely those areas where Ain't
Nobody's Business if You Do (a book by Peter McWilliams). Drugs,
prostitution, gambling, abortion, sexual preference, etc. are all regulated
because one person's morality is being forced on someone else, outside of the
family. I contend that a large number of people, the Nation, cannot be regulated
efficiently on these matters and shouldn't be. The desire to do so is nothing
more than the evolutionary artifact of morality, where my personal actions
drive you crazy because it goes against your personal morality. Well, too
bad. We are not the same. And our moralities (our indoctrination) are different
and personal. And as long as my personal indoctrination did not make me act in
ways that harm you, you have no case for wanting me to quit, other than through
an emotional extension of your tribal need to try and control my behavior for a
purpose that has long passed.[14]

But morality does have reproductive value at the level of family,
friends and associates. And this is where it should remain.[15] To use the
family as an example, members must conform to the accepted morality or get out.
This can be seen in tough love situations where addicts are told to get
out and stop sponging off others. And this is where morality should stay, at the
level of the small group, where everyone is evaluated, and if behavior is out of
line in accordance to the agreed upon moral code, then the offending
person is punished. This is the only reasonable level of moral enforcement. And
when my morality is intertwined with my alcoholism and my need to steal, then I
will be shunned and probably end up in a new group where we all steal
from each other and drink ourselves to death. Conformity is a voluntary response
to wanting to be part of a group for mutual aid and support.[16] So what about
the homeless, the indigent, the schizophrenic, and the drunk? Make damn sure you
behave in such a manner that you always have a support group, and if you
do not have the moral fortitude to do so then social controls are doing exactly
what evolution intended. (Above, only the orphaned schizophrenic may have an
argument for government aid--and I mean maybe.) If those, unable to
conform morally to the norms of the group had as much reproductive success as
those that were held in high esteem, human indoctrinability would not have come
about, and we would be solitary hunters like the cats.

And now for the third form of morality, distributive justice. This
great evil is the one where one person has a lot more family support, ambition,
and intelligence than others less fortunate, and therefor they have a lot more
money than those suffering poor people.[17] This condition, where I have
produced far in excess of what the typical family had 100 years ago,it is
argued, causes in some strange way suffering in others. Lets analyze this
argument, as put forth by Rawls, et al., who advocate egalitarianism. They argue
that economic disparity is an evil![18] And how is that? They never really say.
But it is assumed that bad things happen to those who are of low intelligence,
and I accept that. But that is not my fault, nor should it be any different. Why
would we be so bold as to destroy the very mechanisms that brought us to where
we are, the striving for material wealth in order to enhance reproductive
success. Man has been on a path of evolutionary progress with regards to
intelligence for six million years, starting with the primates. This has all
come about because we first used our intelligence in order to control the
group through gossip. It was a lot more efficient than physical grooming,
grunting, and copulating alone that the primates must rely on for social
control. We now started to use language for the purpose of talking about each
other, and those with more intelligence had more children because they were more
successful at acquiring resources, even if through deception! Was this process,
carried our over many thousands of years, just plain wrong? Now that we have
evolved to this state, do we want to turn it around and start heading backwards,
where the less intelligent will have more off-spring than the more intelligent?
Nature doesn't give a damn about distributive justice, in fact nature abhors
such concepts.

So there we have it. The conservatives lament the loss of morality because
they want others to behave the way they think they should, and
egalitarians (now liberals) want a new moral system for distributing wealth.
Fortunately, the conservatives have been losing their battle as we understand
more about our human nature and where we have come from, but the egalitarians
are indifferent to human nature, denying it exists.[19] They are expanding their
demands for equality in hopes of a Marxist utopia. (Who said Ronald Reagan
defeated Communism--now they are amongst us and we are even less vigilant. Sorry
Ronnie.) Welfare, equality, affirmative action, etc., strips away every
incentive for reproductive success by making it easier for the less intelligent
and lazy to have more children than the more intelligent and productive. But
this problem has been around for at least 2000 years. Empires have always been
concerned with the wealthy not having enough children, but in the past we did
not have Marxism around trying to exacerbate the problem. Now, thanks to the
left, we are in a nose dive to a dysgenic dystopia. The less intelligent are
having more children, are less productive, and are demanding more and more from
those who do provide for the Nation's wealth.

So what do we do with morality? End it as a principle of governing and
replace it with eugenics and principles of fairness and law. You reap what you
sow. If you want socialism, join a socialist commune and leave me out of it.
Your despair at not having enough material wealth, not based on need, but
based purely on the fact that I have been so successful at accumulating much
more wealth than you, may cause you some discomfort, AS IT SHOULD! That is
exactly why nature made women want men with money (meat) for support, and the
reason it made men try so hard to make money (go hunting), so that they could
copulate with as many women as they could. That is HOW we evolved these large
brains. Because men were horny and women needed men to help raise the children,
and greed was and is an integral part of that process. There is
never a point where anyone has enough wealth, because it is not what wealth is
all about. It is about attracting women (for men), and for women to attract men
with money. The welfare state, and everything that goes along with it, is out of
sync with nature, and it is only perpetuated because a lot of easily duped
European-Americans are so easily shamed into believing that the poor are poor
because of some form of political inequality. This universal altruism is also an
evolutionary artifact found primarily in Northern Europeans, where the sparsely
populated region made cooperation a useful evolutionary strategy, whereas
xenophobia is more common in population groups found in areas more densely
populated.[20] How ironic then, under multiculturalism, that the more xenophobic
and racist groups from Africa and the Mediterranean regions are shaming the more
altruistic groups from Europe into accepting a universalist socialism that will
ultimately destroy the United States as it was envisioned by its founding
fathers. The good thing is, groups always fight back once they realize they are
in fact at war. And ending morality outside of the family or group is the first
step to recovery. Universal altruism must never again be of concern to a nation,
only the health of the nation is important. Much of this dilemma is due to our
absurd concept of speceisism.[21] Instead of seeing all population groups as
one, we must look at evolution as a continuum of change, from primates to humans
to ethnic groups and nations, in order to encourage change and experiment with
different ways of niche-building. That is, what groups with both genetic and
social uniqueness are better equipped to evolve a higher intelligence and a more
productive social structure in comparison to others, as evolutionary competition
demands of us.

four things must be met for humans to act with self-control or in a moral
sense, for the benefit of the group: sympathy (without which group living
would be impossible), a sense of fairness or justice, taking responsibility for
one's actions, and a sense of duty or group loyalty.[22] Though different
individuals need to belong to groups more than others, the cohesiveness of the
group can be defined by these basic principles. The glue of course being
an evolutionary process that selected for those who could be easily
indoctrinated and would follow the rules blindly. MacDonald, in Separation
and its Discontents, discusses studies showing that Jews are prone to
joining cults because of their extreme ethnocentrism. And the Indian Caste
system is likewise similar in that it is closer to a secular religion based on
heredity and was originally established to keep the Aryan population separate
from the non-Aryans.[23] That is, the need to be part of a group and to follow
it blindly is a variable trait found in different population groups that goes
from extreme individualism to extreme groupishness (ethnocentrism,
xenophobic, racialists, etc.). But all normal humans have a moral sense
(aside from the occasional sociopath). And we all follow our leaders
unquestioningly as a group whether we want to or not. Note I said as a
group, for every group will have its skeptics, whether because they perceive
some injustice or they think they should be giving the orders. In fact
there is ample evidence that elitists will take on causes for the underclass
more as a means of gaining control than out of altruism or caring, as I contend
President Clinton has been doing with his socialistic programs. His was an
elitist "I feel your pain" in order to attract adoring women so he
could "feel their private parts." But governments are only the largest
definable group that most people submit to, there are no real rules regarding
which or how many groups can function in a large state.

Religion, cults, gangs--they have always attracted differing levels of
fanaticism from their members, and the level of commitment is often in parallel
with the groups recognizing or being in competition with what are perceived as
outgroups. Just as nationalism rises during times of war, and partisan politics
(Democrats and Republicans) becomes dominant during times of peace, groups form
with different amounts of glue depending on the groups they are against.
The new Catholic immigrants over a hundred years ago formed into a cohesive
group, formed their own educational system, and remained as a cohesive group
until they were no longer perceived as a threat by being ruled by a foreign
Roman Pope. The Sicilian Mafia formed into a tight group with a strict moral
code for the advancement of the group, now being replaced by new gangs from many
different countries (Russian Jews, Jamaicans, etc.). But what makes a group more
cohesive than another? Several factors: their innate ethnocentrism or
indoctrinability on the one hand, the perception of an ingroup/outgroup
conflict, and the general intelligence of the members. What? Intelligence is
required to be indoctrinated? It seems so, and is contrary to what we usually
expect, that intelligent people will be able to see the facts more clearly and
will be less susceptible to being duped. But what if they are looking to be
duped, as part of the need to belonging to a well-glued group? Dawkins
makes an interesting note with regards to religion.[24] It is the only area of
culture where children are expected to be indoctrinated by their parents
in one religion, and are expected to accept it unquestioningly, and are
discouraged from evaluating the truth as they grow up. It is probably one of the
best examples where religious beliefs are solely the product of indoctrination
and most people don't really expect there to be much in the way of
discoverability of facts, so just indoctrinate and let it go at that. Why bother
searching for truth when deep in our hearts we know there is none. This is one
of the most glaring examples of self-deception, practiced by all religions,
dogmas and cults.

Take a look at gangs. Today's gangs are made up of a new class of
ingroup/outgroup phenomenon, where black urban gangs perceived as having nothing
to lose, have a need to belong, and yet are not very successful. Large
numbers of them are arrested, and the sense of true solidarity is missing, as
gang members will often turn in fellow gang members for a lighter sentence. The
difference here is intelligence, and the ability to plan far in advance. The
Sicilian Mafia was made up of more intelligent members on average, and they
could foresee the costs of betrayal, while making sure that violators were
punished. Cohesion was enforced by intelligent behavior. The black gangs on the
other hand are on average of far lower intelligence, and group cohesion, or
moral indoctrination, is far less rigid. So intelligence is a two-edged sword.
If a person does not want to be part of a group, and has an innate preference
for individualism rather than collectivism, they will use their intelligence in
efforts not be duped by the government or any other group or organization. But
under different circumstances, when there is a perceived threat, the same
individual can become easily indoctrinated and communitarian, as happened when
National Socialism formed in Germany because of a troubled economy and the
Jewish threat in their midst's, what MacDonald in Separation and its
Discontents, call a mirror-image response to Jewish nationalism. One
group formed because of the other. (Also note that the Russian Jews have become
the latest, and by far the most dangerous organized crime syndicate -- they are
highly intelligent, ethnocentric and without any compassion for lesser
sub-humans in keeping with their Talmudic religious teachings and culture.)

Understanding that indoctrination of the public is required to accept
democracy is the most compelling reason for studying behavior genetics with
regards to the moral sense. Somit and Peterson [25,26,27] are taking the
first steps in asking whether we can assume that democracy is a natural state or
an exception, and they then go on to show that it is only through indoctrination
that Western governments established democracy as the norm. For it to exist,
there must be an ongoing complicity by the government, the press, academics, and
intellectuals to portray what the United States is doing at any particular time
as the correct thing to do in a democracy, even though humans tend to
prefer non-democratic forms of government. Take for example multiculturalism and
diversity. If anyone bothered to look at history and at current nations with
diverse ethnic populations under democracies, it is glaringly obvious that
homogeneous nations fair far better on any number or parameters than
multicultural nations. And yet, it is stated as an unquestioned fact that
diversity is good, and the more diversity a nation has the stronger it will be.
This is an example of an extremely efficient propaganda machine, made to make
acceptance of multiculturalism as integral to our democratic principles, where
in fact this ideology was plucked out of thin air for political purposes by
elite groups for a specific purpose (see my review of MacDonald's book The
Culture of Critique).

No matter how universally altruistic or sympathetic a culture may be, it will
only last as long as resources are seen as in excess of what is needed or
demanded, and that the aid given to others outside of the group are deserving
and recipients would reciprocate if the situation was reversed.[28] For this
universal altruism to exist, Western culture had to be extremely productive to
create a society where the citizens would allow money to be transferred from
those who have to those who are in need. For this to continue, those giving must
be sufficiently indoctrinated by the American polity to believe that it is
deserved. This giving runs counter to our human nature, where giving and
altruism has always been coupled with the ability to determine if those in need
are living in accordance to the rules or morality of the group. Once tribes gave
way to cities, and cities to nations, we lost the ability to hold people
accountable for their actions, and to give aid only if it is deserving. Look at
the average beggar on the street; are they deserving of a hand out and how do we
know? Are those on welfare worthy of assistance or are they incapable of ever
reciprocating and becoming productive members of society? Altruism in the past
has always been a group evolutionary strategy.[29] It never evolved to include
universal compassion. Only through religious and now government sponsored
indoctrination have we been able to convince the dominant culture that this
altruism is deserving, and yet we know those who receive the aid, coming from
more ethnocentric cultures, would reject reciprocity out of hand as not
benefiting them.[30] But again, in order for the current egalitarianism to
succeed, the public had to be indoctrinated into believing that it was in our
national and moral interests to aid all those in need. But now after forty years
of such aid, it is now becoming clear that we were duped. The majority of those
receiving aid will never be productive citizens, in large part due to their low
average intelligence (see American Psychological Association's report Intelligence:
Knowns and Unknowns at http://lrainc.com/swtaboo/taboos/apa_01.html).

Taken to the level of the Nation's capital and the partisanship of the
rancorous accusations on both sides of the aisle in the Bill Clinton and Monica
Lewinsky affair, it is easy to see why morality, and its discussion, falls short
of meeting any political goals that can be grasped by the public. If the very
same philandering were occurring in the home, or in a small cohesive group with
strict prohibitions against such behavior, the situation would entail punishment
and corrective action. But morality just does not operate at a distance, where
the players are presented to the public filtered by the media. The morality in
Washington is a local matter, where gossip keeps track of who is doing what to
whom and why. But their moral codes are not those of the public's. Our
representatives are portrayed as caring, concerned people, in Washington to
represent their constituency back home. But upon arrival in Washington, that
quickly changes (if it did ever exist in any one candidate for office). As we
have learned with Bill Clinton, the public is eager to be lied to, to believe
in, and to accept everything that is said as long as the person merely represents
one's partisan choice. It has little reality in fact. Our evolutionary past has
forged a human nature that must rely on the signals, punishment, altruism, and
regulation of the group, all of whom were known personally by each other. Humans
are evolutionarily incapable of determining what is right and wrong, based on a moral
sense that has no current operating mechanism for evolutionary advancement.
It is time to move past using morality as a public goal and formulate a means to
deal with democracies that are out of control and serving no one but those who
run the government. Manipulation of the public is too easy, when that public is
not equipped to deal rationally with deceit and treachery at a distance. It is
hard enough to spot deceptors that are dealing with us personally.

A good analogy of this phenomenon is found in Steven Mithen's book The
Prehistory of The Mind. As an archaeologist, he explains that the human
brain evolved in stages. We first evolved language and social intelligence over
2 million years ago. During that time to about 100,000 years ago humans used
very crude stone tools that were the same in vary different environments, until
our intelligence increased through evolution and we integrated technology into
our general intelligence with a subsequent explosion of new tools. This is very
similar today, where morality and indoctrination still make up a hidden set of
faculties that we are unable to integrate into higher level intelligence.
Perhaps the only way to get beyond the hazards of an archaic moral system is to
truly evolve to a level where our intelligence can finally integrate what
morality is into a rational system of understanding.Only then will we have moved
beyond the absurd notion that we can know what is right or wrong, rather than
using empiricism to understand how we behave naturally and then decide how want
to structure society to make it work the way we desire, without the shackles of
the artifacts of indoctrination.[31]

EPILOGUE

I started this article several months ago, and as usually happens when you
keep setting something down and returning to it, sometimes the main message
changes or could be stated in a different way. Over that period of time, and
also because in the interim I read several important books by Wilson, Churchland,
and MacDonald dealing in part with morality, I see myself shifting conceptually.
It may not be sufficient to dismiss morality but may be necessary to supplant a
transcendental approach to morality with a national commitment to eugenics based
on a scientific morality--or ethics if you prefer. That is, one where the health
of the nation is too important to be left to a libertarian approach to freedom
and individualism, and we must now return to a more regulated policy of closing
our borders to the low intelligent immigrants, and making a commitment to
increase the average intelligence of our citizens, and reject the Kant/Rawls
formulations that will eventually lead to ruin. There is a fundamental dilemma
with indoctrination and scientific knowledge. What if the only way we can move
humans to a level of intelligence necessary for them to understand morality, is
to use the instruments of indoctrination to fight those who use these tools to
reject science for the specific purpose of destroying Western culture because of
their unabashed hatred for a culture that has worked. What an odd twist--and a
return to past conflicts that never were resolved.

END NOTES

1. Churchland, The Engine of Reason, The Seat of the Soul: These
parallels are reinforced when we look past declared social policy and written
legislation to the institutions that enforce them, in particular, the judiciary
branch of all levels of government. If continuing legislative activity in the
social domain corresponds to continuing theoretical activity in the scientific
domain, then society's judiciary corresponds very roughly to science's
engineers: they both have the job of actually applying the current abstract
wisdom case by case to the real world, to the social world in the former case
and to the natural world in the latter. As with our institutions of engineering,
our judiciary comes to embody an additional layer of wisdom and know-how, a
layer beyond what appears in the standard science textbooks or the written
legislation. How best to interpret the current abstract wisdom, as one attempts
to bring it to bear on an endless variety of novel cases, is something that can
never be exhaustively articulated in a set of written laws, whether scientific
or social. In the latter domain, the burden of such ongoing interpretation is
assigned to the judiciary, and their practice here displays an old friend:
prototypes, or paradigms. They are called "precedents" in the legal
profession, but they play a role comparable to that played by paradigms or
prototypical examples in science. A precedent is an earlier judicial decision on
a specific legal issue, carefully written up by the presiding judge and then
published in the judiciary's legal record, a record that reaches back several
centuries and encompasses hundreds of thousands of cases.

2. Wilson, Consilience: CENTURIES OF DEBATE on the origin of ethics
come down to this: Either ethical precepts, such as justice and human rights,
are independent of human experience or else they are human inventions. The
distinction is more than an exercise for academic philosophers. The choice
between the assumptions makes all the difference in the way we view ourselves as
a species. It measures the authority of religion, and it determines the conduct
of moral reasoning. The two assumptions in competition are like islands in a sea
of chaos, immovable, as different as life and death, matter and the void. Which
is correct cannot be learned by pure logic; for the present only a leap of faith
will take you from one to the other. But the true answer will eventually be
reached by the accumulation of objective evidence. Moral reasoning, I believe,
is at every level intrinsically consilient with the natural sciences. Every
thoughtful person has an opinion on which of the premises is correct. But the
split is not, as popularly supposed, between religious believers and
secularists. It is between transcendentalists, those who think that moral
guidelines exist outside the human mind, and empiricists, who think them
contrivances of the mind. The choice between religious or nonreligious
conviction and the choice between ethically transcendentalist or empiricist
conviction are cross-cutting decisions made in metaphysical thought. An ethical
transcendentalist, believing ethics to be independent, can either be an atheist
or else assume the existence of a deity. In parallel manner, an ethical
empiricist, believing ethics to be a human creation only, can either be an
atheist or else believe in a creator deity (though not in a law-giving God in
the traditional Judaeo-Christian sense). In simplest terms the option of ethical
foundation is as follows:

I believe in the independence of moral values, whether from God or not,

Versus

I believe that moral values come from humans alone; God is a separate
issue.

Theologians and philosophers have almost always focused on transcendentalism
as the means to validate ethics. They seek the grail of natural law, which
comprises freestanding principles of moral conduct immune to doubt and
compromise. Christian theologians, following St. Thomas Aquinas' reasoning in
Summa Theologiae, by and large consider natural law to be the expression of
God's will. Human beings, in this view, have the obligation to discover the law
by diligent reasoning and weave it into the routine of their daily lives.
Secular philosophers of transcendental bent may seem to be radically different
from theologians, but they are actually quite similar, at least in moral
reasoning. They tend to view natural law as a set of principles so powerful as
to be self-evident to any rational person, whatever the ultimate origin. In
short, transcendentalism is fundamentally the same whether God is invoked or
not.

3. De Waal, Good Natured:Without agreement on rank and a
certain respect for authority there can be no great sensitivity to social rules,
as anyone who has tried to teach simple house rules to a cat will agree. Even if
cat lovers fail to see a nonhierarchical nature as a shortcoming--on the
contrary!--it does place their pets firmly outside the human moral realm.
Evolved as solitary hunters, cats go their own way, indifferent to what the rest
of the world thinks of them. For the child, it is the adult's approval that is
sought; for the adult, it may be that of an omnipotent God infused with absolute
moral knowledge. There is obviously more to morality--Kohlberg's scheme counts
six stages up to and including an autonomous conscience--yet submission to a
higher authority is fundamental. This feature is also less peculiarly human than
some of the abilities involved in the later stages: submission to authority is
part of a primordial orientation found not only in our fellow primates, but in a
host of other animals as well." And again, "The second condition for
the evolution of morality, then, is conflict within the group. Moral systems are
produced by tension between individual and collective interests, particularly
when entire collectivities compete against one another. If the need to get along
and treat each decently is indeed rooted in the need to stick together in the
face of external threats, it would explain why one of Christianity's most
heralded moral principle, the sanctity of life, is interpreted so flexibly,
depending on which group, race, or nation the life belongs to. Human history
furnishes ample evidence that moral principles are oriented to one's own group,
and only reluctantly (and never evenhandedly) applied to the outside world.

4. Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language: He
concluded that one of the most important things gossip allows you to do is to
keep track of (and of course influence) other people's reputations as well as
your own, Gossip, in his view, is all about the management of reputation. Taken
together, these observations provide strong support for the suggestion that
language evolved to facilitate the bonding of social groups, and that it mainly
achieves this aim by permitting the exchange of socially relevant information.

5. Anders, The Evolution of Evil:. . .intelligence is a two-edged
sword.... the more flexible an organism is the greater the variety of
maladaptive, as well as adaptive, behaviors it can develop; the more teachable
it is the more it risks being exploited by its ancestors and associates; the
greater its capacity for learning morality the more worthless superstitions, as
well as traditions of social wisdom, it can acquire; the more cooperatively
interdependent the members of a group become the greater is their collective
power and the more fulsome are the opportunities for individuals to manipulate
one another; the more sophisticated language becomes the more subtle are the
lies, as well as the truths, that can be told.

6. Hartigan, The Future Remembered: At the risk of anthropomorphizing,
we might call it the animal group's "public morality." what else can
it be called? If morality is the sum total of the mores, customs, and
conventions of a group, passed on, revised, or abandoned, why can we not say
that the rites and rituals of order in a baboon pack, for example, constitute
its public morality? Its source may be more automatic, spontaneous, instinctual
than in us, but the result and function are the same. It is the "do's"
and "don'ts" of the group, transgression of which brings swift
retaliation from the group's enforcer(s) of public order. Anarchy cannot be
permitted. The group must, for its survival, meet threats from predators or
other conspecific groups with a solid front, while, within the group,
instability will threaten the ultimate safety of all.

7. Dawkins, The Origins of Virtue: Our minds have been built by
selfish genes, but they have been built to be social, trustworthy and
cooperative. That is the paradox this book has tried to explain. Human beings
have social instincts. They come into the world equipped with predispositions to
learn how to cooperate, to discriminate the trustworthy from the treacherous, to
commit themselves to be trustworthy, to earn good reputations, to exchange goods
and information, and to divide labor. In this we are on our own. No other
species has been so far down this evolutionary path before us, for no species
has built a truly integrated society except among the inbred relatives of a
large family such as an ant colony. We owe our success as a species to our
social instincts; they have enabled us to reap undreamt benefits from the
division of labor for our masters--the genes. They are responsible for the rapid
expansion of our brains in the past two million years and thence for our
inventiveness. The evolutionary perspective is a long one. This book has in
passing tried to nail some myths about when we adopted our cultured habits. I
have argued that there was morality before the Church; trade before the state;
exchange before money; social contracts before Hobbes; welfare before the rights
of man; culture before Babylon; society before Greece; self-interest before Adam
Smith; and greed before capitalism.

8. Levin, In Why Race Matters: Rules that endure do so, therefore,
because heeding them, training one's offspring to heed them, and encouraging
one's cohort to heed them, enhance the fitness of cohort members. It follows
that the function of a group's morality is group survival, and it is easy to see
how typical moral rules discharge that function. Injunctions to within-group
honesty, cooperativeness, and nonaggression facilitate trade, construction
projects, organizing for battle, and other activities helpful to all. Such rules
become entrenched because the behavior they prescribe is adaptive. And since
obedience to such rules enhances group fitness, so does the reinforcement of
obedience. However, while a functional account explains why rules persist once
they start being followed, it does not explain the origin of rules, how they
come to be followed in the first place. Finishing the story evidently requires
appeal to biology.

9. Dawkins, The Origins of Virtue: Hartung does not stop there. The
ten commandments, he reveals, apply to Israelites but not heathen people, as
reaffirmed throughout the Talmud, by later scholars such as Maimonides and
repeatedly by the kings and prophets of the Torah. Modern translations, by
footnotes and judicious editing or mistranslation, usually blur this point. But
genocide was as central a part of God's instructions as morality. When Joshua
killed twelve thousand heathen in a day and gave thanks to the Lord afterwards
by carving the ten commandments in stone, including the phrase Thou shalt not
kill, he was not being hypocritical. Like all good group-selectionists, the
Jewish God was as severe towards the outgroup as he was moral to the ingroup.
This is not to pick on the Jews. No less an authority than Margaret Mead
asserted that the injunction against murdering human beings is universally
interpreted to define human beings as members of one's own tribe. Members of
other tribes are subhuman. As Richard Alexander has put it, 'the rules of
morality and law alike seem not to be designed explicitly to allow people to
live in harmony within societies but to enable societies to be sufficiently
united to deter their enemies.' Christianity, it is true, teaches love to all
people, not just fellow Christians. This seems to be largely an invention of St
Paul's, since Jesus frequently discriminated in the gospels between Jews and
Gentiles, and made clear that his message was for Jews. St Paul, living in exile
among the Gentiles, started the idea of converting rather than exterminating the
heathen. But the practice, rather than the preaching, of Christianity has been
less inclusive. The Crusades, the Inquisitions, the Thirty Years War and the
sectarian strife that still afflicts communities like Northern Ireland and
Bosnia, testify to a continuing tendency for Christians to love only those
neighbors who share their beliefs. Christianity has not notably diminished
ethnic and national conflict; if anything, it seems to have inflamed it. This is
not to single out religion as the cause or source of tribal conflict. After all,
as Sir Arthur Keith pointed out, Hitler perfected the double standard of ingroup
morality and outgroup ferocity by calling his movement National Socialism.
Socialism stood for communitarianism within the tribe, nationalism for its
vicious exterior. He needed no religious spur. But given that humankind has an
instinct towards tribalism that millions of years of groupishness have fostered,
religions have thrived to the extent that they stressed the community of the
converted and the evil of the heathen. Hartung ends his essay on a bleak note,
doubting that universal morality can be taught by religions steeped in such
traditions, or that it can even be attained unless a war with another world
unifies the whole planet.

10. MacDonald, A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Ethnocentrism is a
schismatic ingroup/outgroup differentiation, in which internal cohesion,
relative peace, solidarity, loyalty and devotion to the ingroup, and the
glorification of the "sociocentric-sacred" (one's own cosmology,
ideology, social myth, or Weltanschauung; one's own god-given social
order) are correlated with a state of hostility or permanent quasi-war (status
hostilis) towards outgroups, which are often perceived as inferior, sub-human,
and/or the incorporation of evil. ethnocentrism results in a dualistic,
Manichaean morality which evaluates violence within the ingroup as negative, and
violence against the outgroup as positive even desirable and heroic.
Socialization in collectivist cultures stresses group harmony, conformity,
obedient submission to hierarchical authority, the honoring of parents and
elders. There is also a major stress on in group loyalty, as well as trust and
cooperation within the ingroup. Each of the ingroup members is viewed as
responsible for every other member. However, relations with outgroup members are
"distant, distrustful, and even hostile". In collectivist cultures,
morality is conceptualized as that which benefits the group, and aggression and
exploitation of outgroups are acceptable. People in individualist cultures, on
the other hand, show little emotional attachment to ingroups. Personal goals are
paramount, and socialization emphasizes the importance of self-reliance,
independence individual responsibility, and "finding yourself".
Individualists have more positive attitudes toward strangers and outgroup
members and are more likely to behave in a pro-social, altruistic manner to
strangers.

11. Rubin, The Assault on the First Amendment: By labeling any persons
who disagree with them as racist or sexist, defenders of the current liberal
paradigm are able to protect it. Disagreement is not only viewed as a sign of
intellectual dissension; it is characterized as an indicator of low moral value.
Because of the theoretical weakness of the paradigm this argument carries
particular weight. Ambitious scholars would attack the paradigm if it were not
protected by morality. The effort to convert intellectual disputes into moral
disputes may be a more general method of attack; McCarthyism proceeded by
accusing those with certain sets of beliefs as being not only misguided, but
also as being traitors.

12. Hartigan, The Future Remembered: It must first be admitted that we
are a naturally aggressive animal who will respond violently in order to protect
his territory, and that security of territory is a prerequisite to personal
survival and the production of the species' future generations. Organized,
lethal conspecific violence, what we call war, is not an aberration of the
species nor is it a vice. It is a distinctively human activity resulting from
our big brain ability to forestall a future perceived threat by permanently
eliminating an enemy. As a species it is part of our evolution.

13. Levin, Why Race Matters: Cattell (1950) reports a significant
correlation between "general ability" and being "morally
intelligent." Herrnstein and Wilson comment that "a person's level of
moral reasoning is correlated with intelligence, particularly verbal
intelligence" (1985:169). Herrnstein and Murray (1994) report an r of .28
between IQ and a measure of prosocial behavior they call the "Middle Class
Values Index" (1994: 622). Lawrence Kohlberg, well known for his sequencing
of the stages of moral development, describes findings which "support what
we all know: you have to be cognitively mature to reason morally. . . . IQ tests
correlate with moral maturity" (1981: 138-9). Among (white) preadolescents,
Mussen et al. (1970) found correlations ranging from .32 to .62 between IQ,
altruism and honesty. IQ also correlates slightly with sense of humor, stature
and myopia.

14. Churchland, The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul: Someone
might well ask at this point, "What about humanity's great religions? Are
they not also historical institutions that hold up models of worthy and unworthy
behavior, models that shape our lives accordingly?" They are indeed, and
very powerful, too. Moreover, those institutions will no doubt endorse my claim
that moral knowledge is real knowledge. Their grounds for this claim, however,
will be very different from mine. In these pages I have been attempting to
support this claim by highlighting the unfolding process by which we learn from
our mistakes. Moral knowledge, broadly speaking, is real knowledge precisely
because it results from the continual readjustment of our convictions and
practices in the light of our unfolding experience of the real world,
readjustments that lead to greater collective harmony and individual
flourishing. If this is the way one wishes to argue for the rough objectivity of
moral knowledge, then the world's great religions, the Western ones anyway, are
poor examples to help one do it. The reason is simple and not without some
irony. In order to purchase a compelling authority for their respective
catechisms, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism all claim a divine origin for the
moral wisdom that they contain. Their moral laws are held out to us as the
revealed truths or irrevocable commands of God. Putting aside the awesome
presumption of those who would speak for God Himself, the tactical gain
purchased by the claim of divine authority eventually matures into the profound
liability of not being able to change the relevant body of law. Their dubious
claim to authority returns to haunt these institutions. It returns as the
awkwardness or complete inability to learn from mankind's subsequent moral and
social experience. For if those religions have already been given God's final
word directly from God Himself, how can they subsequently claim to find fault
with it? This situation is worse, I think, than mere irony: it is a continuing
tragedy. Some of the most powerful institutions on the planet, for preserving
and teaching such moral wisdom as humanity had already achieved ten or twenty
centuries ago, have now become the principal barriers to the wholly natural
processes by which humanity might ascend to still higher levels of moral
understanding. While important, perhaps, these remarks on religion are a
digression from my main purpose, which is to outline a more modest authority for
moral knowledge; namely, the imperfect but very real authority of our collective
social experience. Let me conclude this section by returning to that theme.
Focus now on the single individual, one who grows up among creatures with a more
or less common human nature, in an environment of established social practices
and presumptive moral wisdom already in place. The child's initiation into that
smooth collective practice takes time, time to learn how to recognize a large
variety of prototypical social situations, time to learn how to deal with those
situations, time to learn how to balance or arbitrate conflicting perceptions
and conflicting demands, and time to learn the sorts of patience and
self-control that characterize mature skills in any domain of activity. After
all, there is nothing essentially moral about learning to defer immediate
gratification in favor of later or more diffuse rewards. So far as the child's
brain is concerned, such learning, such neural representation, and such
deployment of those prototypical resources are all indistinguishable from their
counterparts in the acquisition of skills generally. There are real successes,
real failures, real confusions, and real rewards in the long-term quality of
life that one's moral skills produce. As in the case of internalizing mankind's
scientific knowledge, a person who internalizes man-kind's moral knowledge is a
more powerful and effective creature because of it. To draw the parallels here
drawn is to emphasize the practical or pragmatic nature of both scientific and
broadly normative knowledge. It is to emphasize the fact that both embody
different forms of know-how. How to navigate the natural world in the former
case, and how to navigate the social world in the latter. This portrait of the
moral person as a person who has acquired a certain family of cognitive and
behavioral skills contrasts sharply with the more traditional accounts that
picture the moral person as one who has agreed to follow a certain set of rules
(e.g., "Always keep your promises", etc.), or alternatively, as one
who has a certain set of overriding desires (e.g., to maximize the general
happiness, etc.). Both of these more traditional accounts are badly out of
focus. For one thing, it is just not possible to capture, in a set of explicit
imperative sentences or rules, more than a small part of the practical wisdom
possessed by a mature moral individual. It is no more possible here than in the
case of any other form of expertise--scientific, athletic, technological,
artistic, or political. The sheer amount of information stored in a well-trained
network the size of a human brain, and the massively distributed and exquisitely
context-sensitive ways in which it is stored therein, preclude its complete
expression in a handful of sentences, or even a large book full. Statable rules
are not the basis of one's moral character. They are merely its pale and partial
reflection at the comparatively impotent level of language. If rules don't do
it, neither are suitable desires the true basis of anyone's moral character.
Certainly they are not sufficient. A person might have an all-consuming desire
to maximize human happiness. But if that person has no comprehension of what
sorts of things genuinely serve lasting human happiness; no capacity for
recognizing other people's emotions, aspirations, and current purposes; no
ability to engage in smoothly cooperative undertakings; no skills whatever at
pursuing that all-consuming desire; then that person is not a moral saint. He is
a pathetic fool, a hopeless busybody, a loose cannon, and a serious menace to
his society. Neither are canonical desires obviously necessary. A man may have,
as his most basic and overriding desire in life, the desire to see his own
children mature and prosper. To him, let us suppose, everything else is
distantly secondary. And yet, such a person may still be numbered among the most
consummately moral people of his community, as long as he pursues his personal
goal, as others may pursue theirs, in a fashion that is scrupulously fair to the
aspirations of others and ever protective of the practices that serve everyone's
aspirations indifferently. Attempting to portray either accepted rules or
canonical desires as the basis of moral character has the further disadvantage
of inviting the skeptic's hostile question: "Why should I follow those
rules?" in the first case, and "What if I don't have those
desires?" in the second. If, however, we reconceive strong moral character
as the possession of a broad family of perceptual, computational, and behavioral
skills in the social domain, then the skeptic's question must become, "Why
should I acquire those skills?" To which the honest answer is,
"Because they are easily the most important skills you will ever learn.

15. Fox, Moral Sense and Utopian Sensibility: The evolutionary process
was not concerned with producing some type of ethically ideal good
person, but with a person who could survive. You are constructed to survive in a
world without philosophers, popes or policemen, with an often hostile
environment, including groups like yours but hostile to it, and your own kin as
your only resource.

16. Somit and Peterson, Darwinism, Dominance & Democracy: Homo
sapiens display, we have argued, the genetically transmitted proclivities for
dominance, hierarchy, and obedience that also characterize the other social
primates. Our species has also evolved, however, a behavioral trait that is
unarguably unique among living creatures. We refer, of course, to the capacity
to accept and then to act on the basis of beliefs and values-even when the
resulting actions run counter to our innate inclinations or our personal
desires. As one of our most eminent biologists put it, "of all living
creatures, human beings are uniquely capable of disobeying those biological
inclinations that whisper within them. We alone are able to say 'No' to such
genetic tendencies as may predispose some of us to polygyny, theft, murder,
etc." (Barash, 1994:16). It is this truly remarkable trait that is denoted
by the admittedly awkward and cumbersome term, "indoctrinability."
Because of indoctrinability, ideas, values, and beliefs can profoundly alter the
behaviors of those who embrace them. In a sense, to follow up our earlier
discussion, we become obedient to ideas and ideals. Or, to put the matter in a
more epigrammatic form, "Humans have become intrinsically different from
apes by becoming, in a very limited but real sense, artifacts of their own
artifacts" (Kingdon, 1993:3).

17. Anders, The Evolution of Evil: And so throughout this book I have
lumped the two together under the single broad category of evil. It is my
belief that the ultimate source of both physical and moral evil is the same, and
that that common source is the capacity for suffering. If there did not exist
sentient beings capable of suffering from them, after all, then disease and
hunger would not exist. And such things as earthquakes, floods, and other
natural disasters would not be evil because they would have no victims.
Similarly, without the capacity for suffering that exists in all victims of
immoral acts, there could be no immoral acts. And without the capacity for
suffering that exists in all criminals (and potential criminals), there would be
no criminality. To be sure, if no one ever suffered the pain and frustration
of wanting but not having, then no one would ever be motivated to take what
he wanted by force, and crime would have no purpose. The ultimate source of
moral, as well as physical evil, in short, is the biological capacity for
suffering. And if we are to find the root of all evil anywhere, we are to find
it in this capacity.

18. Rubinstein, Capitalism, Social Mobility, and Distributive Justice:
Kai Nielsen, arguing for socialism, contends that: 'There is . . . a plain and
evident disparity in terms of the whole life prospects of the child of a doctor
and the child of a dishwasher, even when these children are equally intelligent,
hard-working, and the like. We feel that it is wrong--unfair--that their whole
life prospects should be so very different.' One of the most common arguments
for equality in Thomas Nagel's recent book, Equality and Partiality, is
the heritability of inequality: 'Class stratification is clearly an evil: How
could it not be an evil that some people's life prospects at birth are radically
inferior to others' ?' Nagel adduces four sources of inequality: intentional
discrimination, hereditary advantage, natural ability, and effort--and he
describes them 'as forming a progression of increasing moral
acceptability.'" And again, "The sheer vastness of inequality in the
U. S. is troubling. The lowest income quintile receives less than 5% of the
annual income total while the top quintile receives nearly 50%. Inequalities of
wealth are even greater. The top 1/2% of U.S. families owns over 35% of all
wealth, the next 1/2% owns an additional 6.7%, and the top 10% owns over 70% of
net wealth."

19. Norm, Humanism and intelligence: a critique of 'The Bell Curve.':
Though these are noble aspirations, they cannot be achieved if so many people
lack the natural intelligence and propensity toward ethical behavior that
scholars such as Murray and Herrnstein believe are essential for life in modern
society. They argue that a wealthy, intelligent elite will inevitably arise due
to the supposed dumbing down of America. And if such is to be the case, justice
and fairness cannot be secured under such conditions, and discrimination,
intolerance, and authoritarianism will rise dramatically. There will be no sense
in supporting the disadvantaged and handicapped, because they will be
permanently unable to help themselves and will be a burden upon society. It
would be useless to cultivate moral excellence in many people, because they
would be inherently inclined toward immorality. A belief in the fullest
realization of the best and noblest that we are capable of as human beings
certainly could not be applied to all human beings, particularly those with low
IQs. Indeed, if biodeterminism is true, humanism is largely a mistake.

20. Pearson, Heredity and Humanity: Thirty-three years ago, Sir Julian
Huxley pointed to the perversion of altruism that has resulted from the rise of
large urbanized, multi-racial communities, and the dysgenic result of this
re-direction of a natural impulse into unnatural channels in an overcrowded and
heavily acculturated world: 'In that long period of human history during which
our evolving and expanding hominid ancestors lived in small and tightly knit
groups competing for territorial and technological success, the social
organization promoted selection for intelligent exploration of possibilities,
devotion and cooperative altruism: the cultural and genetic systems reinforced
each other. It was only much later with the growth of bigger social units...
that the two become antagonistic... and gave way to the possibility and later
the probability of genetic regression and degeneration.'" And again later
"Today the doctrine of egalitarianism dominates the Western nations with a
quasi-religious mystique rooted in the notion of biological uniformity, but the
resultant spirit of universal altruism is primarily restricted to the culture of
the Western world. If the East Eurasians eventually achieve world dominance --
and already there is evidence that this may come to be--they will surely one day
reflect upon the history of the "dog-eyed" West Eurasian race, and
wonder at the stupidity of a people who could uncover the secrets of biology but
still destroy themselves by refusing to abandon the more dysfunctional aspects
of the confused melee of dysgenic social mores they had inherited from their
pre-scientific past.

21. Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Such is the breathtaking speciesism
of our Christian-inspired attitudes, the abortion of a single human zygote (most
of them are destined to be spontaneously aborted anyway) can arouse more moral
solicitude and righteous indignation than the vivisection of any number of
intelligent adult chimpanzees! I have heard decent, liberal scientists, who had
no intention of actually cutting up live chimpanzees, nevertheless passionately
defending their right to do so if they chose, without interference from the law.
Such people are often the first to bristle at the smallest infringement of human
rights. The only reason we can be comfortable with such a double standard is
that the intermediates between humans and chimps are all dead.

22. Fox, Moral sense and Utopian sensibility: In other words, moral
should not be equated with good but with human. To be human is to be moral, that
is, to act within a definite framework of specific judgmental concerns in
interacting with other humans. Another way of putting this, which some western
philosophers to their credit--even before Darwin--recognized, is to say that we
have, as humans, a "moral sense"--indeed Darwin counted himself as one
of their number. I agree that we have a moral sense for the same reasons Darwin
gave. Natural selection would have favored the development of what we call
morality in any organisms that developed the levels of intelligence,
consciousness, foresight and sociality that humans did. Those individuals that
acted towards other in a "moral" way would be more likely to survive
and have offspring and so on until genes favorable to this moral behavior came
to dominate their amoral alternatives (which did not necessarily disappear
however). A major component of this morality is what I have stressed as
"inhibition" or "equilibration" (after Michael Chance), and
which Wilson deals with under "self control." It is the psychologists'
"deferred gratification, " and without it living according to rules
(morality) is impossible. Other major components are sympathy, without which
group living would impossible; a sense of fairness or "justice,"
without which the settlement of inevitable disputes and the control of cheating
would be impossible; the attribution of responsibility, without which praise and
blame, the system of rewards and punishments, and the raising of children would
be impossible; and again, the sense of duty or group loyalty, without which
(along with sympathy) true altruism would be impossible. In the parlance of
modern evolutionary psychology, these would be "domain specific
algorithms" (or modules) showing a high degree of design adaptedness
perhaps we should always talk of "moral senses" in the plural. Wilson
has caught them all (except perhaps the attribution of responsibility) and done
a fine service in showing the psychological underpinnings which make them work.
I am only concerned that he too is perhaps still stuck with assuming that they
should produce a "good" result. I agree with him that most of the time
they do, in the sense that people do get on with their lives, morals and all,
with a minimum of harm to other people, despite the temptations and distractions
towards selfishness and greed that are all-pervasive. But I find no built-in
guarantees. As he sees, the "moral sense," in this sense, is fragile.
It is easily overwhelmed. It has a narrow range of application. Universal moral
standards are not part of the universal moral discourse--only the meta-discourse
of the philosophers. We may all operate in all our societies around a fixed set
of moral senses, and this will give a remarkable "sameness" to human
moral systems despite their surface differences of rules and standards (much as
there is a sameness to all human languages in the jobs they do despite often
staggering differences in surface grammar, the same with kinship systems). But
it does not mean that there is a universal basis for "goodness"--only
for morality.

23. Pearson, Heredity and Humanity:. . . Indeed, most Indo-European
peoples, including those who resided outside the geographical borders of Europe,
seem to have placed considerable trust in the powers of heredity. Max Weber
documented the same emphasis on heredity among other lndo-Europeans. In The
Religion of India (1958), Weber described the semi-magical xvarenah attributed
to Indo-Iranian kings as a belief in inherited ability, calling it
"familial charisma." The Indian caste system, he maintained, was
sustained by a similar belief in the genetic inheritance of human qualities. The
charisma of a caste, of a sib, and of a family, was genetically transmitted; its
roots were to be found in the concept of inherited ability.

24. Dawkins, Is Science a Religion?: From a 1996
"Humanist of the Year" award speech. What is not sweet and touching is that these children were all four years
old. How can you possibly describe a child of four as a Muslim or a Christian or
a Hindu or a Jew? Would you talk about a four-year- old economic monetarist?
Would you talk about a four-year-old neo-isolationist or a four-year-old liberal
Republican? There are opinions about the cosmos and the world that children,
once grown, will presumably be in a position to evaluate for themselves.
Religion is the one field in our culture about which it is absolutely accepted,
without question--without even noticing how bizarre it is--that parents have a
total and absolute say in what their children are going to be, how their
children are going to be raised, what opinions their children are going to have
about the cosmos, about life, about existence. Do you see what I mean about
mental child abuse?

25. Somit and Peterson, Darwinism, Dominance & Democracy: The
proposed explanation promptly triggers the second question: How, then, can we
account for the undeniable occasional emergence of democratic polities? Many of
those who have wrestled with this problem find the answer in some unique
concatenation of economic, social, historical, and political
"facilitating" factors. These factors undoubtedly play a role.
Nonetheless, paradoxically enough, we must again turn to evolutionary theory for
the necessary, though not sufficient, condition that makes democracy sometimes
possible. Although it shares the proclivity of its fellow social primates for
hierarchical social organization, Homo sapiens is the only species capable of
creating and, under some circumstances, acting in accordance with cultural
beliefs that actually run counter to its innate behavioral tendencies.
The generally accepted, if lamentably awkward, term for this truly unique
capacity is "indoctrinability." Celibacy and the (presumably) less
demanding ideal of faithful monogamy are obvious examples of indoctrinability at
work. Democracy, an idea almost as alien to our social primate nature, is
another. It is indoctrinability, then, that makes it possible, given some
conjunction of the aforementioned facilitating social, economic, and other
conditions, for democracies occasionally to emerge and to have some chance to
survive.

26. Somit and Peterson, Darwinism, Dominance & Democracy: . .
.there must also concurrently evolve, in Eibl-Eibesfeldt's phrase, "a
disposition to accept subordination and obedience". In short, however
repugnant the idea, natural selection has endowed us with "a readiness to
comply with a submissive role" or, as Barash would have it, with "an
inclination to follow orders, an appropriate behavior for a species organized
along distinct lines of dominance." Acts of obedience are of two sorts. In
one, the organism does something that it would prefer not to do; in the other,
the organism refrains from doing something that, left to its own choices, it
would prefer to do. An example of the former would be a situation in which a
subordinate chimpanzee gives up a desirable resting place to a dominant; in the
latter, it refrains from copulating with a receptive female because of the
threat, explicit or implicit, of a dominant. In the case of chimpanzees--or
members of any other social species--obedience is rendered to a more dominant
fellow conspecific, that is, one who occupies a superior place in the group's
social hierarchy. Humans, to be sure, live in many hierarchies. In this
discussion, though, we are concerned only with political obedience, that is,
actions taken by subordinates in response to the commands, again implicit or
explicit of those above them in the political (or sometimes military) hierarchy.
So long as that hierarchy is perceived as "legitimate," our genetic
tendency is to obey. As Kelman and Hamilton stress, one "striking
phenomenon of hierarchies of authority ... is the readiness of citizens to
accept orders unquestioningly ... even when obedience entails enormous personal
sacrifices or the commitment of actions that, under other circumstances, they
would consider morally reprehensible". Obedience is thus a behavioral
correlate of dominance and hierarchy. If inclusive fitness is to be optimized, a
social species must evolve all three behavior--dominance relations, hierarchical
social systems, and obedience. All three, surely, are characteristic of Homo
sapiens. Not surprisingly, this disposition or inclination can be discerned at a
very youthful age: according to Stayton, Hogan, and Ainsworth, the
"earliest manifestation of obedience in an infant appears in the final
first quarter of the first year of life". Discussing similar results
achieved with slightly older children, they continue that: "These findings
cannot be predicted from models of socialization which assume that special
intervention is necessary to modify otherwise asocial tendencies of children.
Clearly, these findings require a theory that assumes that an infant is
initially inclined to be social and [somewhat later] ready to obey those persons
who are most significant in his social environment.

27. Somit and Peterson, Darwinism, Dominance & Democracy: All of
us have made sacrifices, too, often very substantial sacrifices, in behalf of
some deeply felt belief system, whether social, religious, or political. The
capacity to hold abstract values, and their reciprocal ability frequently to
dictate our actions, are simply further aspects of indoctrinability. In short,
whether manifested in the form of conscience or of ideational commitment,
indoctrinability is demonstrably capable of inducing behaviors that run counter
to our own desires and, on occasion, to our genetic inclinations. To be sure,
given the basic bias of our evolutionary inheritance, humans are predisposed to
embrace authoritarian political, social, and even religious beliefs. Until the
early 1800s, the history of political philosophy shows, philosophical and
popular opinion alike strongly favored authoritarian and decried democratic
political doctrines. In helping to reinforce our hierarchical bias,
indoctrinability has probably contributed significantly to the predominance and
persistence of authoritarian governance throughout human history. But the
capacity to believe and then to act on the basis of those beliefs is not limited
to any specific set of ideas. There is almost no limit to the range and variety,
or eccentricity, of the values humans are capable of accepting and acting upon.
This is true in religion, in philosophy, in ethics, in art and in politics.

28. De Waal, Good Natured: Altruism is bound by what one can afford.
The circle of morality reaches out farther and farther only if the health and
survival of the innermost circles are secure.

29. Hartung, "A Review of A People That Shall Dwell Alone" in the
journal Ethology and Sociology volume 16:335-342 (1995): Like all human
groups that compete long enough to be counted, Judaism entails codes of behavior
that curtail competition within the group in order to facilitate competition
with other groups. In addition, Judaism added the ultimate foundation for
cooperation: "Love thy neighbor as thy self" (from Leviticus 19:18).
MacDonald reviews a prodigious number of secondary sources, authored almost
entirely by Jewish historians, which substantiate the argument that Judaism's
moral code stopped at the border line--that this apex of morality was meant, and
has for practical purposes been taken to mean, "love your coreligionist as
yourself.

30. Kalb, "Freedom, Discrimination and Culture" in PINC Online
Magazine, July 1997: Cultural discrimination must therefore be forbidden if
the civil rights laws are to achieve their goal. However, culture can not be
separated from how men carry on practical life. When close cooperation is
required it is absurd to ignore the things that give us our sense of who we are.
"Cultural differences" mean that people who differ in ethnically
differ in upbringing, and taking upbringing into account is no less reasonable
than taking formal education into account. An ethnic culture, after all, is a
system of habits and attitudes that has grown up among people who have dealt
with each other for a very long time, and it continues to exist because it is an
aid to living and working together. There would be no Little Italy's or
Chinatowns if those who shared such things gained nothing by staying together.
The civil rights laws prohibit recognizing the public functions of culture;
since culture exists in relation to its functions, the effect is to require its
destruction. In addition, traditional morality always involves
"racism" and "religious discrimination." A tradition must be
that of a particular people, so to recognize the importance of traditional
morality is to accept the significance of ethnic and religious affiliations.
Since the traditional moralities of immigrants and minorities often differ on
important points from that of the dominant majority, an emphasis on traditional
morality puts the former at a disadvantage. Differences in moral outlook are
important even when both sides are highly moral and similarities in a sense go
deeper than differences. Anglo-Saxons and Chinese both respect experience, but
they express their respect differently, the Anglo-Saxons by honoring legal
tradition and the Chinese by honoring old people. Mix the two races together and
each will complain about the other's moral character; in a society run by one in
accordance with its own view of right and wrong the other will be perpetually at
odds with established institutions.

31. Fox, Moral sense and Utopian sensibility: If goodness--or at
least the definitional problem of goodness-- has very little to do with
morality, what does? We find this hard to swallow precisely because of our
confusion of "moral" with "good." Let me put it graphically:
to say that we live moral lives has nothing to do with saying that we live good
lives. Many Nazis lived very moral lives. Headhunters and cannibals live very
moral lives. Inner-city gang members live very moral lives. Maximum security
prisoners live complicated moral lives. Columbian drug lords live very moral
lives. Most terrorists live super-moral lives. You are shocked because you
assume that this must mean that they lead "good" lives according to
your notions of the good. But whether or not these are bad people, and some
assuredly are, they still live according to rules and standards or morality
framed in the universal discourse. Drug lords will argue fiercely about the
fairness of the division of spoils according to effort versus the division
according to investment. Gang members will reward the loyal and punish the
treacherous and assume that those so acting are responsible for their acts.
Nazis would insist on strong family, sound racial hygiene, and devotion to the
fatherland. Headhunters will despise a man who cheats in his method of taking a
head. Terrorists will give up their own lives in the name of a higher value and
argue that in their struggle there are no innocent victims since all are in part
to blame for injustice even through passive acquiescence. (They have problems
with children, although I have heard elaborate justifications here too.) In
fact, only a relatively few psychopaths and sociopaths and total sadists (that
is, people who are constitutionally incapable of developing a social conscience)
can be said to live outside the iron necessity of operating within the universal
framework of moral discourse. Thus, groups of people doing what seem to us very
bad things still do them in a very moral way. And this is my point: since they
are organized groups of human beings trying to live highly social human
lives--whatever their aims and objects they have no choice but to live according
to a moral order. This is what human groups and societies are; this is the only
way they can operate. Do a simple thought experiment: try to design a society or
organized group that operates according to "pure reason," taking
everything on its merits without preconceptions, making no prescriptions on the
basis of descriptions, assigning no responsibilities, and so on. It is
inconceivable of course. It would not be a human society. Nor would a society
operating on the "greatest happiness principle" or the
"categorical imperative" or the "original position" or any
other of the fantasy states of the philosophers. Even the designers of utopias
have to accept the framework of the universal moral discourse; they simply alter
the content to suit their own prejudices about the good life. The more they
depart from this, the more lunatic their creations appear. The only real
alternative to the moralizing, moralistic and morally obsessed human society is
ultimately the genetically engineered caste system of Huxley's Brave New World
or Hellstrom's Hive. The totally rational and non-judgmental society of Spock's
Vulcan might exist, but as all Star Trek fans recognize, it is not a human
society, and Spock is only made plausible by being half human himself.